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Monday, September 10, 2007

The idea for this post is sparked by a conversation Kevin (Harper) and I had over a lunch in the University mensa...

You know the feeling: You receive an SMS and it all sounds like Greek to you (or chinese if you are Greek). There is this gibberish text that you need to decipher first. 2n9t for tonight, C u for See you soon and take good care etc.

Some may argue that this is the end of well spoken languages, the downfall of English.To others (like me) it just signifies the creativity of people. Why do kids SMS like that to begin with? Because initially the message was limited to few characters only. Nowadays you can have some hundret characters in an SMS, enough to write complete sentences and words. Yet, the new SMS language prevails. To me, this is an evolution of language. This whole issue is particular interesting to me as a non-native speaker. I would argue that one needs to fully comprehend a language in it's correct form first before you could use and understand the SMS language. Same as humor. If you don't get the fine nuances of language, the best joke is lost on you.

Trouble starts if you don't speak SMS.

What will be next? Contracts signed in SMS in short? Advertising using SMS lingo?